We need to look at this from several angles. Yes, most have fast internet these days, which means that for a single person the time spent downloading a 1GB update isn't really a problem like it might have been 10 years ago, but what about the literal hundreds of millions of other macOS users? We're talking hundreds of petabytes of network traffic that happens multiple times a year.
Say that update could have been optimised down to say 100MB through shipping only binary diffs instead of complete executables, that's hundreds of petabytes of network traffic that doesn't need to be transferred, which means less link congestion, less packet processing, less data temporarily stored not just on customer machines but in datacenters as well.
Unnecessarily large updates in systems with hundreds of millions of users has a non-negligible environmental impact.
I'm not 100% convinced it's all that negligible, but in general I agree with your sentiment. Inefficient software updates are a pet peeve of mine. If I download 5GB of software patches I'd expect to see major differences after applying the patch, but most of the time these days it's barely noticeable changes, yet the patches are still huge.
Just look at the iOS 17 OTA packages for iPhone 14 Pro.
- 16.6.1 -> 17.0: 3.3GB - fair enough, new major version
- 17.0 -> 17.0.1: 452MB - security updates and bugfixes
- 17.0.1 -> 17.0.2: 384MB - security updates and bugfixes
- 17.0.2 -> 17.0.3: 450MB - security updates and bugfixes
- 17.0.3 -> 17.1: 1.35GB - this one is interesting, an update from 17.0.2 to 17.1 is actually about 150MB smaller than from the latest version which uses the same upgrade package as 17.0 GM
- 17.1 -> 17.1.1: 395MB - security updates and bugfixes
- 17.1.1 -> 17.1.2: 414MB - security updates and bugfixes
In total, I've downloaded about 3.44GB of updates for my iPhone since the iOS 17 upgrade in September, and have received WiFi AirDrop support, some security fixes, and better Home app Matter support. Security fixes are in general just a few lines of changed code, and should result in minimal changes to a binary, so if you just diff the new binary with the old one it should come out pretty minimal, yet the patches are several hundred megabytes.
Someone in a different thread suggested Apple were doing partial binary patching, but I don't see it.
Say that update could have been optimised down to say 100MB through shipping only binary diffs instead of complete executables, that's hundreds of petabytes of network traffic that doesn't need to be transferred, which means less link congestion, less packet processing, less data temporarily stored not just on customer machines but in datacenters as well.
Unnecessarily large updates in systems with hundreds of millions of users has a non-negligible environmental impact.